Wired for the Future

In a special Media Watch episode, three leading media figures discuss the future of journalism in the wired world. Is the newspaper a "dead duck" and if so, where will journalism be without it?

Are these boobs the most ludicrous on the planet

See the pictures here

Jodie Marsh showed off her new 32GGs at London's Orchid last night...

— Daily Telegraph online, Are these boobs the most ludicrous on the planet, 18th April, 2008

At the click of a mouse, Sydney's Daily Telegraph can bring us London's Daily Mail - and a British model's very large new assets. The wonders of journalism online.

Welcome to Media Watch. I'm Jonathan Holmes.

Last week saw the fifteenth anniversary of the birth of the world wide web as a free resource. So this week on Media Watch, we're going to take a break from the media's mistakes and misrepresentations. Instead, we're going to look at a much broader issue: the future of journalism - especially quality journalism - in the wired world.

Last Thursday, the ABC's Sydney headquarters hosted a conference on precisely that topic.

There were optimists at last Thursday's conference - like Mike van Niekerk, the Editor-in-Chief of Online at Fairfax Media, owners of The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and the Australian Financial Review.

Mike van Niekerk: People who say that newspapers are on their last legs and are about to die are completely wrong in my view. I think that newspapers have a very long future.

It's true that newspaper sales in Australia have been holding up much better in recent years than they have in Europe and the United States.

But there are local pessimists too. Eric Beecher, a former editor of the Sydney Morning Herald who now publishes websites like Crikey and Business Spectator, says that many of Australia's biggest-selling newspapers - including Fairfax Media's - are heading for trouble.

Eric Beecher: Because the business model is largely funded by classified advertising, by these vast revenues - the rivers of gold as they're called - from classified advertising in newspapers. So an average page in The Age or the Sydney Morning Herald on a Saturday brings in 40-thousand dollars, and there's a hundred of them, and that's 4 million dollars a week. And that pays for all the journalists' salaries. That advertising is moving to the internet.

Fairfax's Mike van Niekerk says that for media companies, diversification is the key to survival.

Mike van Niekerk: Fairfax Media as a company has several different businesses that represent different, ah different, media streams - we do video now, we do radio, we do all sorts of different things - and that all adds up to the revenue that helps pay for the journalism.

And if you look at just on the website. Look we have some very big classified websites but we've also added to that, we now have a baby website for mothers, we have the biggest personals website in Australia. Now these are new sources of revenue that add to the total mix.

Jonathan Holmes: But they're not going to make revenue that will replace the huge profit margins that your shareholders if you like, were used to in the days of the rivers of gold are they?

Mike van Niekerk: Well maybe not. Maybe the profit margins will adjust, but I still think that for a long time in the future we are going to be doing quite well.

Well, even if the pessimists are right, so what? Some of us may love the feel of a newspaper in the morning. Most younger people find the new technologies faster, and quicker, and cheaper - and they cost fewer trees.

But the problem is that there's no obvious substitute for the newspaper business model when it comes to funding quality journalism.

Eric Beecher: Big newspapers like the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age and The Australian have editorial staffs of hundreds and hundreds of people and foreign bureaus, and big bureaus in Canberra, and that's really the the serious journalism of Australia.

Jonathan Holmes: Has anyone yet - given you've a vested interest in this - found a model to make that sort of quality journalism pay online?

Eric Beecher: Not on that scale. Not with editorial staff of hundreds of journalists doing all the things that that kind of journalism does in print, no.

Of course right now, if you're looking for quality journalism, it's a golden age.

The best of British or American reporting - or any other country's, if you speak the language - is available at the click of a mouse, more and more of it absolutely free.

But so far, none of those websites have worked out how to make money from their international fan-base

Their quality journalism is still being mainly paid for by advertisers and newspaper buyers in their home countries. And, says Roy Greenslade, it can't last.

Roy Greenslade: Unless they can find a way of turning a profit then there could be a crisis for them in future. It's a bit of a race against time to be honest and that is can you support your print product long enough in terms of it making a profit, can you do that long enough in order to have that space in which to build an advertising base, a sponsorship base, some other form of a business base in order to be able to sustain quality journalism into the future? And I think that's the great difficulty we face.

In Roy Greenslade's view - and he's not alone - the future of journalism may well depend much less on people like me, and much more on people like you.

Roy Greenslade: In future there will be advertising, it won't be enough to fund huge staffs as there are now, but we'll have a core of professional journalists. We can fund them and then, in company - in participation with citizen journalists, bloggers, user-generated content, however you want to describe that, amateur journalists - that in company with them - crowd-sourcing, mash-ups, however you want to do it - that you will form a different kind of approach to journalism.

Jonathan Holmes: My job, right now, is to criticise the mainstream journalists in this country if they get things wrong. And in a sense, because they are part of the mainstream journalism there's a consequence to getting things wrong, even if it's only a scolding from the boss, or a public humiliation. This democratic journalism, in a sense they'll be no-one to blame if things are wrong, and will there be anyone to check if its right?

Roy Greenslade: For me, what's happening already is that we the journalists are being constantly criticised and told we're doing the wrong thing. Newspapers are slow to apologise, slow to admit they ever got things wrong - on the net you can do it instantly - say yup, screwed up there, let's put it right.

Jonathan Holmes: So if we get it wrong, we don't get it wrong for long?

Roy Greenslade: No, look, you get it wrong for five minutes and I think that is not only a democratic form, we're getting better more accurate journalism because that's the way ahead.

That's not, of course, how many journalists on our newspapers, big and small, see things. Right now, they feel that diminishing staff numbers, and mounting pressure to put stories online within minutes, are conspiring to reduce the quality - and the accuracy - of what they do.

And there's another worry. Online technology lets editors know, minute by minute, which stories are attracting the most hits. And stories about celebrities, sex, animals and freaks will always outscore the latest dispatch from Parliament House.

The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age have never been tabloid newspapers.

Yet online they're the third and fourth highest-ranking general news websites in Australia - as single-newspaper sites, they're numbers one and two.

But some say that to gain those new online readers, Fairfax Media is risking its reputation for quality journalism.

Dolphin killed in mid-air trick

Balls up: Ronaldo's prostitutes turn out to be transvestites.

I had you babe: Cher tells Oprah of Tom Cruise affair.

Janet's GLAAD about award

— Sydney Morning Herald online, 29th April, 2008

Last Tuesday - a typical day - three celebrity yarns and an animal story on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald online. None of them appeared anywhere in the newspaper.

Mike van Niekerk: Absolutely you will see some stories that will resemble entertainment, stories about celebrities, I don't deny that. They are there. And that's part of what we do, is entertainment, but we also inform. And the quality journalism is there and those stories actually represent a very small fraction.

Yet few quality news websites overseas - from the Guardian to the Washington Post - have quite the same mix of serious and populist as the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Roy Greenslade thinks it's a dubious strategy.

Roy Greenslade: Because we're expecting people to transfer their loyalty from the newspaper platform to the web platform they won't go across if they think those values are different or if the content is different. So it's a huge mistake to think that you can do one thing with one platform and another thing with the other.

But Mike van Niekerk says that, to some degree at least, Fairfax Media is doing just that very successfully.

Mike van Niekerk: I think they speak to different audiences. They are slightly different audiences. In fact I can tell you that the percentage of people that read both the print edition and the online edition is roughly about 25%.

Jonathan Holmes: The concern I guess would be though, if your web pages are the look of the future, if you like, the developing medium. And the newspaper is the one that's on the way down. If that's the case, does that mean that quality journalism is on the way down? Does that mean that funding the Canberra bureaus and the foreign bureaus and doing the investigative journalism is on the way down?

Mike van Niekerk: You know if that were to be the case, that would be the time that I would get out of this business because that would take all the fun out of it for me.

If the doom-mongers are right, a lot of journalists will be out of a job quite soon. But, they may be wrong. Certainly the web achieves wonders already, for journalism as for so much else.

Only this week, on News Ltd's PerthNow website, we were able to watch almost as it happened when police searched the offices of the Perth Sunday Times.

If you choose to leave I have police officers stationed at the exits of the building, they may ask you for your name, and some means of identifying who you are, and they may search you for the items that we're looking for on this warrant.

— PerthNow website, 30th April, 2008

What they were looking for was anything that might help identify the source of a story which had embarrassed former ABC journalist Alan Carpenter's state government.

And a sorry sight it was.

We may well revisit it next week. Meanwhile, for extended interviews - and for links to the conference on the future of journalism - visit our website.